Fiat Lux: Illumination to Action

At the IN-NW 2017 conference, David Patton , Senior Manager of Digital Media at Vulcan, Inc. “enlightened’ us about the various marketing lessons we could learn from their successful 2015 global campaign, “Fiat Lux” (Let There Be Light). The project leveraged the documentary film Racing Extinction and Pope Francis’ Encyclical on the environment called Laudato Si, or “Praise be to you”, which enters into dialogue with all people about protecting “our common home.”

Patton describes how they created a campaign around the film with a call to action so that people around the world could do something to make an impact to save our environment for generations to come. The goals of the campaign were to 1) amplify the Pope’s “our common home” message and 2) influence the leaders in Paris to pass COP21, the historic agreement on climate change.

Photo from IN-NW 2017 by Fahad Aldaajani

He talked about the simplicity of the campaign, how they leveraged existing content (the film) to build action and do great storytelling through massive media attention, social sharing and livestream views. The end result was a life-changing global event that projected remarkable wildlife imagery on the facade of St. Peter’s Basilica to inspire action on climate change: FIAT LUX: Illuminating Our Common Home. This session provided invaluable lessons for any marketer when creating an integrated marketing campaign: 1) think bigger, 2) add to your moments, 3) find partners, 4) use what you already have, 5) content + stories matter and 6) capture attention and compel action. How can you help? #ourcommonhome